Antiques on Display
■ Visitors peruse a selection of antique motorcycles on display Saturday in Hill Wheatley Plaza as part of the Hot Springs Bikefest. The inaugural Bikefest featured vendors, live music, and games for participants. All proceeds from the event go to help veterans in the central Arkansas community.
on retaliation. We don’t focus on revenge,” Wilson said before the ceremony. “We focus on the good that all of our loved ones have done.”
Former President Donald Trump visited a New York police station and a firehouse, praising responders’ bravery while criticizing Biden over the pullout from Afghanistan.
“It was gross incompetence,” said Trump, who was scheduled to provide commentary at a boxing match in Florida in the evening.
The attacks ushered in a new era of fear, war, patriotism and, eventually, polarization. They also redefined security, changing airport checkpoints, police practices and the government’s surveillance powers.
A “war on terror” led to invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the longest U.S. war ended last month with a hasty, massive airlift punctuated by a suicide bombing that killed 169 Afghans and 13 American service members and was attributed to a branch of the Islamic State extremist group. The body of slain Marine Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo was brought Saturday to her hometown of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where people lined the streets as the flag-draped draped casket passed by.
The U.S. is now concerned that al-qaida, the terror network behind 9/11, may regroup in Afghanistan, where the Taliban flag once again flew over the presidential palace on Saturday.
Two decades after helping to triage and treat injured colleagues at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, retired Army Col. Malcolm Bruce Westcott is saddened and frustrated by the continued threat of terrorism.
“I always felt that my generation, my military cohort, would take care of it — we wouldn’t pass it on to anybody else,” said Westcott, of Greensboro, Georgia. “And we passed it on.”
At ground zero, multiple victims’ relatives thanked the troops who fought in Afghanistan, while Melissa Pullis said she was just happy they were finally home.
“We can’t lose any more military. We don’t even know why we’re fighting, and 20 years went down the drain,” said Pullis, who lost her husband, Edward, and whose son Edward Jr. is serving on the USS Ronald Reagan.
The families spoke of lives cut short, milestones missed and a loss that still feels immediate. Several pleaded for a return of the solidarity that surged for a time after Sept. 11 but soon gave way.
“In our grief and our strength, we were not divided based on our voting preference, the color of our skin or our moral or religious beliefs,” said Sally Maler, the sister-in-law of victim Alfred Russell Maler.
Yet in the years that followed, Muslim Americans endured suspicion, surveillance and hate crimes. Schisms and bitterness grew over the balance between tolerance and vigilance, the meaning of patriotism, the proper way to honor the dead and the scope of a promise to “never forget.”
Trinidad was 10 when she overheard her dad, Michael, saying goodbye to her mother by phone from the burning trade center. She remembers the pain but also the fellowship of the days that followed, when all of New York “felt like it was family.”
“Now, when I feel like the world is so divided, I just wish that we can go back to that,” said Trinidad, of Orlando, Florida. “I feel like it would have been such a different world if we had just been able to hang on to that feeling.”